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How You can Leverage Cloud Platforms to Transform Digital Experience

The next time Kawhi Leonard misses a 3-pointer, you can criticize him backed with accurate real-time data (shooting percentage) hovering over him.

Confused?

The LA Clippers move to improve the fan experience by choosing Amazon Web Services (AWS)—a cloud platform—to be its primary cloud computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence provider for the CourtVision game-watching platform will put the fans in control of viewing experience. AWS will enable viewers to toggle across multiple modes with real-time data and augmented reality features.

“The combination of cloud computing and machine learning has the potential to fundamentally redefine how fans experience the sports they love.” – Mike Clayville, Vice President of worldwide commercial sales at AWS

Innovating the customer experience powered by cloud technology is not just restricted to sports organizations; rather, a cloud-powered future is disrupting almost every business sector that is migrating toward remote infrastructure.

“Up to 60% of organizations will use an external service provider’s cloud-managed service offering by 2022.” – Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner

However, a staggering number of cloud migrations fail: 37% of them fail. Big brands like Twitter and Pinterest have experienced a cloud migration failure. Even the UK-based bank TSB witnessed a cloud migration fiasco, forcing them to increase interest payments to cover customer losses.

Why 37% of Cloud Migrations Fail?

There is a widespread chatter in Silicon Valley about cloud adoption going mainstream. However, no one ever whispers about how and why cloud platform adoptions fail to deliver seamless customer experience.

One of the main reasons businesses experience cloud adoption failure is because they fail to integrate their cloud adoption plan as a vital part of their broader business transformation strategy.

Gartner estimates that less than one-third of enterprises have a documented cloud strategy.

When businesses migrate to the cloud, they often struggle to do a fundamental engineering task right, which is to explore all the applications and figure out what happens if they fail. Most enterprises are aware of basic practices involved in the cloud platform adoption process. Still, the chances of hardware failure are inevitable with massive data centers relying on thousands of servers.

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and, I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.” – Abraham Lincoln

During a project, as gigantic as cloud migration, planning is the critical factor that paves the way for its successful adoption. If you embark upon your cloud adoption journey with proper planning, you will definitely be able to enhance the digital experience of your consumers.

How can Cloud Platforms Enhance Digital Experience?

Cloud computing is an IT paradigm based on remote access to a shared pool of computing resources. It is continuously evolving from a market disruptor to the expected approach across all the industries in today’s digital era, thereby being one of the valuable innovations in today’s IT and business strategies.

Cloud computing is the best way to turn rowdy ideas into functional software. Forrester dubbed 2019 as the year of global enterprise adoption of cloud.

Before going ahead with a cloud platform integration process, all the CxOs need to familiarize themselves with the benefits of adopting cloud platforms, learning about cloud security, and understanding how successful cloud implementation leads to delivery of seamless customer experience.

Here are the top reasons why moving your business to the cloud can help enhance the digital experience.

Security

Most businesses have security concerns when it comes to the adoption of cloud computing. Cloud security breaches constantly make news headlines.

Concerns about security have led some stakeholders to limit their organizational use of cloud services. A study by Cloud Security Alliance suggests that the security of data is the top concern for 73% of companies, thereby forcing them to hold back cloud projects.

cloud security concerns

Cloud security breaches do happen. However, they are often framed with ambiguous explanations. The reality is that most of the data thefts occur internally and are performed by employees.

Gartner predicts that through 2020, 95% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault.

When this is the case, then what will be a better place to keep sensitive information safe than the cloud platform? The cloud security services allow you to protect your data and monitor security-related activity, thereby enabling you to increase your security posture in the cloud, deliver more agile IT, and lower costs.

94% of businesses saw an improvement in security after switching to the cloud, and 91% said the cloud makes it easier to meet government compliance requirements.

Thus, rather than asking whether cloud adoption is secure or not, ask whether I am using cloud computing securely or not?

Easy to Develop and Host Applications

Before cloud platforms, it was a job of software developers to buy, configure, and maintain their own servers. Such tasks are a source of distraction and act as a hassle in performing the core work of writing good code and release software securely and quickly.

3M wanted to get rid of this issue when they came up with their own sets of tools—Visual Attention Service—for their graphic designers. The organization wanted these sets of tools available to its employees through a web-based application. However, they were unsure about the demand that this step would offer.

3M turned to the Windows Azure cloud platform to host their application, which resulted in boosting their revenue by 50% and reducing the time to scale, format, and upload an image from 15-to-20 seconds to 2-to-3 seconds.

3M on adoption of cloud platform technology

The adoption of cloud technology offers benefits to companies by enabling them to increase the scale and power of their IT and the speed at which the deployment process undergoes. Moreover, it also eliminates administrative headaches and works across devices, locations, and organizational boundaries.

Maximize Collaboration and Productivity

Companies existing in today’s global world have their offices spread across different countries, cities, and continents. Thus, it is inevitable for them to face collaboration problems and problems related to delivering information fast and securely at any time. However, with cloud technology, it’s not a problem anymore.

With workplace breaking down into more remote, cloud platform adoption allows your decentralized teams to access, edit, and share documents from anywhere and in a better manner.

77% of businesses adopt a cloud communications platform because it supports remote work.

For instance, to improve the knowledge capturing and sharing among its 1,30,000 employees, the consulting firm CSC, today called DXC Technology, turned to Jive: a cloud-based collaboration software. Using this approach, the organization made Jive available to all its employees.

The result was that more than 25,000 employees registered for the new cloud-based resource, called C3, in just 20 weeks of experimentation. Eventually, the positive results motivated the company to make C3 permanent.

Lem Lasher, the company’s President, and CIO said that C3 has been simply stunning. It is the de-facto standard for how we collaborate. It’s the language of the company.

Data-Driven Insights

With 97% of data sitting unused by organizations, finding a way to utilize it is a holy-grail for enterprises in today’s digital era. Moreover, it is estimated that 87% of organizations have low maturity levels in terms of data analytics capabilities.

Thus, to leverage the high volumes of data and enable a scalable and secure data infrastructure, organizations must turn to cloud-based analytics.

The global cloud analytics market is expected to grow from US$11.272 billion in 2017 to US$37.816 billion by 2023 at a CAGR of 22.35%.

The CAGR of 22.35% is higher than the CAGR for any other industry. Seeing the potential of the cloud analytics market, the tech-savvy leaders involved in the digital transformation space are getting motivated to invest in cloud analytics.

Moreover, cloud providers these days are working upon algorithms that focus on understanding, predicting, and influencing consumer behavior both offline and online, as discussed above in the case of LA Clippers ‘CourtVision platform.’

LA Clippers using AWS Cloud Platform
source: www.businessinsider.in

Remember, unused data is a virtual goldmine. Thus, instead of sitting on a pile of untapped and valuable data, start adopting a cloud platform to gain data-driven insights, which will allow you to compete with the market leaders.

Conclusion

Cloud technology has rapidly entered today’s physital business world. And those who restrain themselves in embracing it are at the highest risk to undergo dire consequences of digital Darwinism—evolve or become extinct.

Cloud migration leveraging IaaS or PaaS or SaaS can significantly improve the digital experience in the business world, which is becoming complex day by day. With cloud adoption, your business gets an upper edge to stay above the chaos and be as productive as possible.

A robust cloud strategy based upon your business and functional requirements can help you reach the next levels of agility, security, resilience, and efficiency.

Source: https://www.netsolutions.com/insights/cloud-platform-enhancing-customer-experience/

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